A review of How Scholars Create a Past by Thomas L. Thompson
Review by William Dalrymple published in The Sunday Times, London, April
4, 1999

The theological departments of our universities are not the sort of
places that one normally associates with blood-curdling threats, savage
feuds and colourfully intemperate language. But over the past decade a
violent dispute has erupted in the ivory towers of biblical studies that
has divided Old Testament scholars into two warring camps, neither of
which is now on speaking terms with the other.

Thomas L. Thompson, the distinguished professor of Old Testament
Studies at the University of Copenhagen, whose fascinating and
controversial The Bible in History: How Scholars Create a Past
(Cape £25) has been at the centre of the spat since its beginning.
Indeed, he has been the target of much of the more violent polemic:
after publishing his last study of the Old Testament, one of his
American rivals, William Dever, denounced Thompson in print as "a nasty
little man who has had a nasty little life". Since then the exchanges
have become, if anything, more heated: Thompson and his British academic
allies have been accused of being anti-religious and anti-Israel while
their generally American opponents have in turn been dubbed blinkered
Bible-bashers and arch-Zionists.

The debate (if such an enjoyably ill-tempered exchange between
fiercely hostile academic enemies can be called that) revolves around
the thorny issue of the historicity of the Bible, and for all the circus
antics of its protagonists, at its heart the controversy does, in fact,
add up to one of the most important discussions on the factuality of the
Bible since the time of Darwin 150 years ago.

If nobody today−except for a few Midwestern Christian
fundamentalists−believes in the literal truth of the description of
creation in the Book of Genesis, scholars have traditionally been much
more willing to accept the basic historicity of the Old Testament
accounts of such figures as Joshua, Saul, David and Solomon. Miracles
apart, the traditional scholarly view has always been that the books of
the Old Testament do contain the outlines of a true story, and that many
of its great heroes were real flesh-and-blood historical figures, who
lived in real palaces, fought real battles, and ruled over real
kingdoms. It is this set of assumptions that is now under serious
scrutiny.

The core of the argument of the "Biblical Minimalists", to which
Thompson's The Bible in History acts as a lucid and accessible
introduction, is the idea that the Bible was never meant to be read as a
history book: it is a religious text, "a theoretical and literary
creation" written many centuries after the events it purports to
describe, which tells in metaphor the story of mankind's relationship
with God. To read it as a factual rendition of political history is to
completely miss the point. After all, the earliest surviving texts of
the Old Testament− the Dead Sea Scrolls−date only from the troubled
Hellenistic period, a couple of centuries before Christ, when the Jews
were beginning to map the boundaries of their faith and attempting to
give religious meaning to their oldest legends. More important, few of
the books of the Hebrew Bible seem to have reached their current form
until, in some cases, a full 1000 years after the events they describe.
As Thompson quite reasonably points out, the Bible's collection of
stories and legendary lore about a lost distant golden age provided an
ethnically and religiously diverse "ancient society with a common past",
and is "very different from the critical histories" that are written
today. We can no sooner assume the Old Testament's historical accuracy,
he argues, than we can assume the historicity of King Arthur or King
Lear.

Thompson argues that the only contemporary source for the
period−archeology−gives a picture of a very different world from that
described in the Old Testament: the Jerusalem of the 10th century BC,
supposedly the time of King David, was more a small tribal stronghold in
a landscape of scattered farms and villages than the palatial centre of
a sophisticated empire depicted in the Book of Samuel and the Book of
Kings. There is no evidence of vast temples or palaces surviving from
the period as high culture "hardly existed... Most of what has survived
is either of foreign origin or derivative... culturally, Palestine ever
remained Syria's southern fringe." Yet, according to Thompson, biblical
archeologists have not let the evidence of their digs stand on their own
merits: they have always tried to interpret them through the filter of
the Bible, and tried to adjust and upgrade the archeological record so
as to fit the picture presented in the Old Testament. In this way, so
the argument goes, biblical scholars have seriously distorted the
history of the region and presented a largely fictional picture of its
past.

The problem, of course, is that the books of the Old Testament are
not just dead manuscripts that are the exclusive preserve of academics;
they are living, sacred texts, held holy by Jews and Christians across
the world. However much you emphasise the religious and metaphorical
nature of their content, millions of people desperately wish for the
story to be literally "true". Moreover, in the Middle East, the books of
the Old Testament have profound political as well as religious
significance. In its 1948 Proclamation of Independence, Israel referred
to "the re-establishment of the Jewish state", thus basing its right to
exist on the biblical precedent of the Israelite kingdom.

Since 1967, the same justification has been advanced for the Israeli
colonisation of the West Bank and Golan, and many of the new Jewish
settlements that were set up were deliberately built on sites identified
as having been colonised by the ancient Israelites 3000 years earlier.
In the same way, the Book of Samuel was used as justification for the
Israeli seizure of East Jerusalem and its annexation to form Israel's
"eternal and united capital". Only last month, Binyamin Netanyahu kicked
off his election campaign by encouraging Jewish settlers to "return" and
colonise the Palestinian village around the oldest archeological site in
Jerusalem. Yet despite renaming the area "the City of David" and
desperately searching for the buildings referred to in the Bible,
Israeli archeologists have to date found no significant David-period
remains, and most of what has been found has recently been shown to
predate his assumed period by some 800 years.

So deep is the attachment that many people hold to the Bible that it
would be wise for scholars to tread carefully when they seek to
challenge it, for they tread not just on dreams, but the most profound
yearnings of people's lives. Thompson does not always show the
sensitivity he could do, and at times he overstates his case, assuming
that in biblical archeology, the absence of evidence is evidence of
absence, when common sense would indicate that with a strong oral
tradition this may well not be the case. Yet for all the polemical cast
of his argument, this is a book of the greatest importance, written with
passion and verve, and its case is clearly a strong one. Thompson is
right to emphasise that traditional biblical scholars are guilty of
giving a religious text a factual historicity it neither seeks nor
deserves. His book is probably just one battle in what will prove to be
a long war between rival camps of scholars. But it is a debate that will
be fascinating to follow.